theartblog

A think piece on the Internet meme known as “snackwave”. To generalize, these are pictures of virtually anything unhealthy; pizzas, burritos, cheetos, burgers etc. [The Hairpin]

Forgery news is pretty dependable content for art pubs, but this one’s for the ages: Employees of the nearly hundred-year-old Uzbek State Art Museum have been caught selling art from the collection and replacing them with forgeries. Chief curator Mirfayz Usmonov has received a nine-year sentence, the Guardian reports. Do people ever successfully get away with this? [The Guardian]

The old Art Moving Projects space has been filled with another art gallery. It’s called Moiety and it’s run by co-founders Joshua Schwartz and Kyle Smith. [Hyperallergic]

The Smithsonian has digitized more than 40,000 works of art from their Asian collection and will make them available to the public in the new year. [The Art Newspaper]

Here’s hoping the hostage situation in Sydney gets resolved without any lost lives. Last night an armed man took over a coffee shop and put up a black sign with white script. The message appeared to be the shahada, the Muslim declaration of faith. [The New York Times]

$67 million project to democratize the Louvre. This means signs, wall text and renovations to make the museum more tourist friendly. [The New York Times]

Diane von Furstenberg is one of the moguls behind Manhattan’s new floating park. [New York Magazine]

Animal New York’s latest “Artist’s Notebook” features Rachel Mason, who spent 8 years working on a televisual opera “The Lives of Hamilton Fish”. Research has led her through photographs, newspaper clippings, and correspondence with her subjects’ descendants and a convicted murderer. And tons and tons of notes. [Animal New York]

Douglas Gordon has installed a massive pool with pianos in the Armory. Christian Viveros-Faune finds very little beyond that and wonders about the project budget. The idea sounds like the worst of Armory shows, banking on awe factor in order to hide a thin premise (read: Ann Hamilton’s curtain). [artnet News]

Everyone is coming out with sexy 2015 calendars. We’re not the only ones in the art world doing so; we found this New York City Freelance Art Handlers calendar that popped up on Etsy. [Etsy]

Lonely Planet declares Queens, New York the number one vacation spot in the U.S. All across the Internet you can hear cries of “Noooooooo!” shouted by Queens residents. [Lonely Planet]

The rich people hobby of building museums gets another participant: Norma and Irma Braman plan to single-handedly fund the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Braman told the Times “Whatever the cost is, we will be building it, period.” [New York Times]

Sally Kohn writes a great piece about some of the wrong headed feminism that has made headlines recently. This includes the feminist response to Mark Zuckerberg’s comment that he wears grey t-shirts because he doesn’t want vanity to distract him from his job—some thought this statement was meant to invalidate a woman’s choice to dress nicely. Also on the list was the latest Lena Dunham dust up over her memoir wherein she describes looking at her little sister’s vagina at the age of seven and masturbates near her in the same bed. This resulted in an uproar over whether this was natural and a campaign to get Planned Parenthood to drop Dunham as their spokesperson complete with the twitter hashtag #DropDunham. [The New Republic]

Speaking of Lena Dunham’s memoir, another point of contention seems to be an account of her sexual assault. She makes clear that she used a pseudonym to describe the person who assaulted her—it seems some reporters have been making someone else’s life hell—and talks about her decision not to open a criminal investigation. [Buzzfeed]

A woman sexually harassed by an Uber driver receives $31 in compensation from the company. [Jezebel]

Baer Faxt: Art book publisher TASCHEN will open the TASCHEN Gallery in Los Angeles this Saturday with “It’s Just a Shot Away: The Rolling Stones in Photographs”, bringing together almost 100 photographic prints tracing the band’s history.

Say hello to the new anti-Tindr, Hinge, which connects you only with people who have mutual friends on Facebook. [Wired]

Author Chris Kraus admits she doesn’t make much money off of her writing passions. “I realized early on that the kind of writing and art I was most drawn to was not the most highly rewarded, so I made other plans. I teach on a visiting basis as much for the contact as for the income. I live mostly off rents.” Is she a landlord? Does she Airbnb? We are left to ponder the meaning of “rents.” [Full Stop]

Hurricane season is upon us. California prepares for the most powerful storm in five years. [CBS News]

Comics execs are threatened by female cosplayers, who dominate the industry. “Cosplay combines comics with the stereotypically feminized world of fashion,” writes Noah Berlatsky. “It’s a way for folks to combine a love of Batman or Thor with a love of fabric and sewing and dressing up.” [The Atlantic]

The Pope’s New Year address will advise against buying products made by slave labor. [Agence France-Presse]

By now, we have a fairly good handle on New York art stars, but we hear less about the people who love them. In two years of writing for AFC, I’ve owed my art-viewing as much to artists as I have to devoted curators, gallerists, and writers working diligently behind the scenes, knee-deep with the rest of us.

Who are these unsung heroes of the art world? I asked leaders of various emerging art communities for their recommendations, and gathered a series of interviews. Today we talk to Deana Haggag and Catherine Akins, Libby Rosof an Roberta Fallon, Tom Weinrich, Alex Ebstein and Seth Adelsberger, and Rod Malin.